Who

The Political Machine

I renewed my drengin.net subscription today, specifically so I could get
access to the beta test of Brad Wardell’s still-in-development election game
The Political Machine.

The Political Machine

I’m a big fan of Brad’s games, and have long felt that he brought an exciting
independent voice to PC gaming. I don’t play too many PC games anymore, what
with the Xbox filling so many of my needs and my main leisure computing
platform being a Mac. But that’s my problem, not Brad’s, and I figured if
anyone would make an interesting game for that platform it would be him. So I
bit the bullet to take a look. Please keep in mind that I’m being a little
unfair to Brad here in reviewing what’s basically an alpha. I promise I’ll
review it again once the final version is released and all the bugs are worked
out. I’m deliberately not going to talk about any bugs I might encounter now
because, hey, fixing the bugs is what beta-testing is for. I approached this
game with a little trepidation, since I’ve recently discovered that Brad’s
politics are a little on the fringe. Well, let’s be honest: in my opinion,
he’s a right-wing kook. My biggest fear was that this stridency would
translate into the game as bias. So the big news from my corner is: no need to
worry. Candidates are free to take any position; positions have effects on
Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. And if I disagree with some of the
particular choices that Brad made (if you think all Democrats oppose gun
control – or, for that matter, the war in Iraq – you need to get out more),
they’re all at least good-faith arguable as caricatures, which is probably the
most we can expect from an election game. More to the point, those choices are
balanced in game terms. It’s clear that whatever political beliefs Brad has
take a back seat to his design sensibilities. That’s a good thing. There are
also facilities not yet implemented but clearly on-the-way to edit the
attributes associated with each candidate. This is good, because even if Mr.
Wardell gets things “wrong” (according to my personal biases), I’ll be able to
fix them. Lastly, there’s a facility that I haven’t tried yet for setting up a
“fantasy scenario” where states don’t have their real-world leanings (you
could make a Massachusetts that was strongly Republican, for example).

President Elect 1988

The gold standard of election games would be SSI’s President Elect. It had a
intriguing resource allocation system where you would basically ‘swing’
through a series of related states on tours, and you had to decide how much
time you’d spend campaigning in each region or state. Periodically, you’d go
into a debate and try to avoid taking any controversial stances. I like The
Political Machine more than President Elect, as a game. That might be
unfair to the older game, since it’s clear that its author intended it to be
viewed as a serious simulation (and if my results in 1984 and 1988 were
anything to judge by, it was a damn effective simulation – it called both
elections perfectly, for me. If I had a football simulator that good, I’d be
rich.) The Political Machine does not feel like a good simulator to me
(where’s the “start campaign with $200,000,000 already in the war chest”
button?), but it does feel like a good game.

Doonesbury Election Game

I also like it more than the underrated (if flawed) Doonesbury Election
Game, even if that did have a bit more built-in character (and a hideous user
interface). The UI on The Political Machine is something I’m still trying to
come to grasp with. Basically, it’s an updated and morphed version of the UI
from The Corporate Machine. I’m a little uncomfortable with the UI in the
game, so far, but some of that may just be that I’m vaguely discomfitted that
it’s not exactly like the Corporate Machine in every way. Maybe that’ll
shake off after a few more games.

The core aspect of the game is: you have 41 weeks (turns) before the election.
There are two primary resources: money, and stamina. Money buys advertising
campaigns and campaign headquarters which increase your name recognition. Your
candidate has so many points of stamina he can spend each week; stamina can be
spent earning political capital (“back room deals”), giving speeches on the
campaign trail, flying from state to state, or, most importantly, fundraising.
Political capital is a secondary resource which can be spent to buy campaign
aides (consultants, spin doctors, the guys that broke Nancy Kerrigan’s
kneecaps) or political endorsements. It’s the balance between fundraising and
the other activities that seems to be the key mechanic in the game. Spend too
much time fundraising and your message doesn’t get out and, paradoxically,
there will be less money available to you. Spend not enough time fundraising
and you’ll find yourself stranded in Indiana, unable to even afford plane
fare.

Trust me. You don’t want to get stranded in Indiana.

One aspect of the game that I’m looking forward to improving is the
availability of more candidates. One of my favorite activities in President
Elect was running fantasy candidates against Ronald Reagan and seeing what
happened. I was pretty much never able to come up with a major politician that
President Elect didn’t already have modeled. That impressed me. It’s a
steeper hill for The Political Machine since they have spiffy cartoon
caricatures of their candidates, so there’s an art cost associated with
including more of them that the earlier games didn’t have to bear. But I hope
they do add as many as they can, anyway.

I have not tried the networked multiplayer game yet. I’m looking forward to
it, though.

In a lot of ways The Political Machine feels like a mini-scenario for The
Corporate Machine. That’s meant to be a compliment, not a criticism. Behind
the flash of the interface I see some of the same Risk-like proximity effects
going on. As the game nears completion it will be fun to discover more ways in
which it diverges from its elder sibling. Cheers to Brad (and to Stardock) for
keeping the flame of small, independently produced games burning.

Additional Resources

All politics is retail:

You can obtain The Political Machine by subscribing to Drengin.net. It’s for the Windows platform. Subscribing to Drengin also gets you some neat other games, like Galactic Civilizations and The Corporate Machine. Now if we can just convince Stardock to join the OS X tidal wave…

If you’d like to play President Elect, you can. As always, I prefer the Apple ][ versions, either 1984 or 1988